Wilbur Smith, bestselling author, 88, has died

Wilbur Smith, a former accountant whose novels featuring lionhearted heroes, covetous family dynasties, steamy lovers, coldblooded pirates and big-game hunters were said to have sold some 140 million copies in 30 languages, died, Nov. 13, at his home in Cape Town, South Africa. He was 88.

His death was announced on his website. No cause was specified.

Over more than five decades, Smith’s historical thrillers and adventure novels, which often spanned several generations and several continents, became a popular franchise of series and sequels.

Reviewing his book “The Diamond Hunters” in The New York Times Book Review in 1972, Martin Levin wrote that “the potpourri Wilbur Smith has assembled is rife with lifelong misunderstandings, undying hates, unbelievably nefarious schemes and nick‐of‐time rescues — delivered with the deadpan sincerity of the pulp greats.”

Raised on a 30,000-acre cattle ranch in what was then the British protectorate of Rhodesia (and is now Zambia), Smith was a bookish boy whose strict father discouraged reading (“I don’t think he ever read a book in his life, including mine,” he told The Daily Telegraph in 2007) but went on to draft plots on official paper he lifted from his work at the government’s Inland Revenue Service.

He completed his first manuscript, in 1962. Twenty publishers sent telegrams rejecting it. He revised and reduced it, embracing the advice of Charles Pick, the deputy managing director of the publishing house Heinemann, to tell a story that drew more fully on his own experience.

“Write only about those things you know well,” Smith said Pick advised.

Inspired by the life of his grandfather, who was lured by the Witwatersrand gold rush of the 1880s and fought in the Zulu wars, and by his own upbringing on his father’s ranch, Smith wrote “When the Lion Feeds,” which was published, in 1964.

It became the first in a successful series of what Stephen King, in 2006, praised as “swashbuckling novels of Africa” in which “the bodices rip and the blood flows.” Subsequent decades would bring other series, based in Southern Africa and ancient Egypt.

“I wrote about hunting and gold mining and carousing and women,” Smith said.

He set other books in locales ranging from Antarctica to the Indian Ocean. “Wild Justice” (1979), one of the first of his books to become a bestseller in the United States (where it was published as “The Delta Decision”), was the story of the hijacking of a plane off the Seychelles — one of many places Smith called home. (He also had homes in London, Cape Town, Switzerland and Malta.)

Wilbur Addison Smith was born on Jan. 9, 1933, in Broken Hill, Northern Rhodesia (now Kabwe, Zambia). He was named for Wilbur Wright, the aviation pioneer. His father, Herbert, was a rancher who became a sheet metal worker. His mother, Elfreda, was a painter who encouraged his reading.

He contracted cerebral malaria when he was 18 months old.

“It probably helped me,” he said later, “because I think you have to be slightly crazy to try to earn a living from writing.”

He caught polio when he was a teenager, which resulted in a weakened right leg.

When he was eight, his father gave him a .22-caliber Remington rifle.

“I shot my first animal shortly afterward and my father ritually smeared the animal’s blood on my face,” he wrote in his memoir, “On Leopard Rock: A Life of Adventures” (2018). “The blood was the mark of emerging manhood. I refused to bathe for days afterward.”

He attended Michaelhouse, a private boys’ school in the KwaZulu-Natal midlands of South Africa. He started a student newspaper there, but he hated school.

“Michaelhouse was a debilitating experience,” he later recalled. “There was no respect for the pupils. The teachers were brutal, the prefects beat us, and the senior boys bullied us. It was a cycle of violence that kept perpetuating itself.”

Reading and writing, he said, became his refuge.